Tolkien and terror

A tale of good and evil battling under the dark cloud of fear, Tolkien's masterpiece resonates with a wisdom that our recent horror allows us to understand.

By Jim Paul

Nov 15, 2001 | In one of those odd zeitgeisty moments, when one finds oneself a creature of the culture without even trying, I picked up J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" recently, for the moment forgetting about the three-movie hobbit extravaganza about to be visited upon us. I found one of the three volumes on a shelf and wondered what I'd think of it now. I'd loved it when I had read it before, in the flower power era. I ended up reading the entire work, all 1,000 pages.

It surprised me. I am not a fantasy buff. My friend Harry simply said he would never read a book that long that had elves in it, and I had to agree. But what I recalled about the book and what I found still true was that it was scary. Evil flying things cast shadows of despair across the land, and these things, the Nazgul, still had a potency that got me through dozens of pages of elves and dwarfs.

The book has its other points. Tolkien was a serious and learned scholar of Anglo-Saxon myth and language, and an Oxford Don, and this, his life's work, remains monumental and beautifully written, if seriously eccentric. As amazing as ever is the minutely detailed geography of Middle-earth, as well as the fully foliated language system for each of the various races in it. Tolkien the philologist wrote that the book was "fundamentally linguistic in inspiration," a story written to provide a world for his invented languages.

There is, it hardly needs to be said, no sex on any of the thousand pages of the work. Hobbits seem to procreate through poetry. Tolkien was a devout Catholic born in the 19th century and was Victorian about matters sexual. In a letter advising his son he wrote, "The hard spirit of concupiscence has walked down every street and sat leering in every house since Adam fell."

But never mind that. The book is still scary, in some ways scarier than when I last read it. What surprised me about the novel is how current it seemed. For Tolkien's book is a story of war, and its theme is one we've heard a lot about recently: the nature and power of evil. This work of hobbits and elves and wizards, innocence and far-sightedness and magic, is all about terror, it turns out, and about the difficulty of countering evil deeds.

The dark days of 2001 are more like the days in which Tolkien wrote the book than any since. The first of the three volumes of "The Lord of the Rings" appeared in 1954. Tolkien began the work in 1938 and wrote it throughout World War II. And though he discouraged readers from reading any "'allegory,' moral, political or contemporary," into the work, it's clearly the product of war years and dire times, no less so than Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, with which it shares the fantasy of total victory, the quest of the doughty individual hero against an unredeemable enemy and an obsession with magical technology, if not sexual conquest.

"The Lord of the Rings" is a war story; more particularly it is story of grim war coming to an innocent country, the Shire, the home of the race called hobbits. Short and furry-footed, hobbits are unmistakably English, tidy homebodies, natives of "a well-tended region," colloquial connoisseurs of a good smoke and a good brew.

What the hobbits do best, though, is make foils for the evil characters, bad guys still perfectly terrifying and memorable. Sauron, Tolkien's arch villain, embodies absolute evil, and never appears in person in the book. Both near and far, everywhere and nowhere, the Dark Lord Sauron in his tower in Mordor controls things from a distance, watching events through his "seeing stone" and emitting clouds of smoke and stinking ash to cover the movements of his armies and his emissaries.

The principal thrill of the book still comes from the fearsomeness of Sauron's black-cloaked outriders, the Nazgul, hooded phantoms sent into the far reaches of Middle-earth to do his will. The scariness of these emissaries themselves also arises from their indefiniteness. Beneath their dark mantles, they have no expressions -- only a deadly gleaming pair of eyes.

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